Someone set up us teh famine!

«Official aid is increasingly being used to drive
African countries towards trade liberalisation. [...] The paradox, however, is that the US and EU,
the world's two largest trading blocks, are not
implementing at home the free trade policies that
they insist that African countries take. This was
starkly seen last month when the US announced
its new farm bill which will increase US farm
subsidies by $35bn, or more than $20,000 to
each farmer.

European subsidies are only slightly lower, the effect is that rich countries can
continue to flood African markets with artificially cheap food and products, and that
African producers who get minimal help from their cash-strapped governments find
it ever harder to export. The Ghanaian rice industry, Bono and O'Neill saw for
themselves, has collapsed in recent years as heavily subsidised US (and Thai) imports
have flooded in. From being an exporter, Ghana now imports $100m of rice a year. »

--"Trade not aid: The west demands that African countries adopt free-trade policies,
then it floods the continent with subsidised goods which destroy their
markets"

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and the brother of the President isn't governor of a state that's strongly affected by the politics

While one could make a case that George Bush should now consider lifting the embargo and isn't because of this kind of influence, one should also bear in mind that Bush did not establish the embargo in the first place.

--J. David works really hard, has a passion for writing good software, and knows many of the world's best Perl programmers